


Polaris Monstrosus

by rAnines (clockworkcorvids), TesIsAMess



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: :'), Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Father-Son Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Found Family, Gen, Hallucinations, Panic Attacks, Post-Pacifist Best Ending (Detroit: Become Human), Self-Doubt, Wendigo, Winter, all that fun stuff, no beta we die like men, uhhhh, warning for descriptions of a corpse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21944782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clockworkcorvids/pseuds/rAnines, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TesIsAMess/pseuds/TesIsAMess
Summary: Connor, struck by that sense of humor that comes only to the delirious and broken, willed up memories of the Zen Garden, of Cyberlife. Cyberlife as a person, a group, an idea. Cyberlife as the monsters, now, towering, hideous things with spidery hands and cataracted eyes. Connor ripping apart deviants, one by one, the people and then their ideas, slowly becoming the monster Cyberlife had wanted to create.
Relationships: Hank Anderson & Connor
Comments: 14
Kudos: 71
Collections: New ERA Discord: Winter Big Bang





	Polaris Monstrosus

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to the fantastic chroma for organizing this bb, and thanks to tes for bringing your amazing art to my story! happy holidays and winter to everyone, and i hope you all enjoy this ♡

  
  


Connor wished he had enough data to tell him whether all winters would be like his first, but he only had this, his second winter, to use as an experiment. 

Oh well. He told himself, every time he began to fret about this, that two datasets are better than one. And regarding the first, complete set of data, his brother―Nines, not the other one, who had yet to make it clear whether he actually considered himself Connor’s brother or not―said upon seeing it, “rA9, that’s a lot to unpack.” 

So there was that.

In theory, he shouldn’t have been afraid of anything, but in practice...whoever said that deviants are human must have meant it in every possible context. He got through his first winter alright, given that it started off late, and by the time he really  _ had  _ time that wasn’t taken over by thoughts of the revolution and thoughts of his past, the snow was already beginning to melt. 

The snow. In theory, in theory, so many things worked  _ in theory _ but just fell apart the second they were introduced to the real world.

_ In theory _ , Connor didn’t mind snow. It did what snow did, falling down from the clouds and making Hank complain about his back until Connor insisted on taking the shovel from him and, usually, generally looking quite lovely. But in practice, there were the storms, and they were alright from inside Hank’s house or inside the DPD, when Connor was warm and safe and sufficiently distracted. Being caught outside in the snow, though...that made his stress levels spike, and his heart rate speed up, and the first few times Connor felt the sting of crystallized ice on his face and simultaneously heard the wind howl between highrises, he had to override the combat protocols that automatically kicked in.

At that point, he felt safe making the inference that he was afraid of snow storms. He knew why, too, not that that would help him overcome his fear; thinking about that would only make him relive memories he’d been tempted to delete in the past and, well, that wasn’t somewhere he wanted to go.

Connor wanted to go to a place, a time, a future where winter as a concept didn’t strike fear into his not technically (but functionally very) human heart.

For now, he just collected data. It was his second winter, 2039-2040. The anniversary of the revolution had passed just over a month ago, and Nines’ unofficial birthday as well. Currently, Detroit was in the midst of winter holiday festivities. 

He had plenty of data, so he let it accumulate. And he waited for the big turning point, the point at which he would have enough data to  _ know _ , or to at least make a reasonable inference.

It was snowing when he and Hank were called to the crime scene. In the woods, at dusk, on a frigid night. Crime scene tape and footprints made a path from the parking lot the DPD had set up shop in to the scene itself, so far into the trees that the floodlights were the only thing visible in the distance. The river was somewhere else here, further into the woods, and past that, the Canadian border.

“You know,” Hank said as he and Connor, thoroughly bundled up, headed through what little of the night’s snow the trees didn’t obscure, “they say there are wendigos in these woods.”

He waited, as he often did, for Connor’s LED―now yellow as he searched the Internet for information on  _ wendigos _ ―to turn back to blue. Leaves and ice crunched under their feet as they walked. Off in the distance, back in the parking lot, someone called out an order to someone else. The wind whistled. 

Connor’s LED turned blue, its normally pervasive light almost nothing next to the oppressive darkness of the woods. Even the snow beneath his feet had lost some of its reflectivity. 

“Wendigos as in the cannibalistic humanoid monsters of Algonquian folklore?” Connor asked, having thoroughly scanned multiple references on the subject in the last few moments.

“Yep,” Hank said. “Plenty of sightings in this stretch of woods. Could’ve sworn I saw one myself once, but I’m not really sure. Nobody ever is.” 

He sounded disconcertingly unbothered, especially considering the implications of that statement. Connor, for his part, hadn’t been programmed to believe in anything but what he saw, what he knew for sure to be true, what could be proven. That was not to say that he didn’t believe Hank had seen something in these woods, but he didn’t have any personal experience with the paranormal against which to weigh this. And anyhow, he had never bothered to explore whether there might be something beyond this world. He was content with what was tangible.

But Hank’s claim still interested him, as did the folklore behind it. The idea of becoming monstrous through a hunger to hurt your own kind, or of being possessed by something that made one monstrous, recalled flickers of memory to the forefront of Connor’s mind.

Connor suppressed all thoughts of what he was supposed to be. He and Hank were approaching the crime scene here, and now, and that was what was important.

To his own credit, he managed to stay perfectly on task all the way through the crime scene investigation, even as the snow began to worsen and some officers had to string up a tarp above the scene to avoid contamination of evidence. Connor knew, though, and knew very well, that fear can only be escaped for so long. It was just a matter of how he would react when it eventually caught up to him, and as for that...his stress levels began to tick upwards as soon as the tarp came out. People were yelling, and that didn’t bother him, they were just keeping things organized. That brand of chaos wasn’t the sort of thing that tended to get to him anyways, so he continued to examine the crime scene, vaguely aware of Hank’s presence in the background with some of the other officers, as well as the hiker who had found the body. 

As for the victim, his body had been there for a while. The consistent cold weather and frosts that had struck Detroit over the last month or so had slowed down the process of decomposition, leaving evidence intact, and the frozen skin of the body had taken on an almost dehydrated look. It reminded Connor of the description of a wendigo that he’d seen, a gaunt and desiccated creature, but he doubted the parallels between the two extended past physical appearance. Then again, a corpse was a monstrous thing in its own way, no longer human after the loss of the things, whatever they might be, that had once made it alive.

Connor looked up, past the tarp, and found that the snow was coming down stronger than before. What little of the sky he could make out from beyond the bare tops of the trees was white, grey, blank, beginning to coat even greyer wood and the few evergreens that stood here. Snowflakes stung his eyes, his whole face, and he blinked them away. 

Returning his attention to the scene, he realized that he still needed to scan one more part of the scene, where potential evidence had been found a reasonable distance away from the body.

“Hank!” he called to his father, who immediately looked up and over to him, “I’m going to go look at the other evidence!”

Hank flashed him a thumbs up. “Be careful, son! Snow’s getting worse!”

Connor echoed Hank’s gesture, and headed towards the second cluster of evidence, which was a few meters away through the trees. It wasn’t far, but left to his own thoughts and devices Connor couldn’t help but imagine what might be out there. Or rather, what might happen to him were he to spend too long out there.

The rest of the evidence was useful, albeit somewhat uninteresting at this point. It was mostly someone’s mundane possessions, most likely those of the dead man, and as far as Connor could tell, he didn’t find anything new from this evidence that the human detectives hadn’t already. Well, corroboration of evidence was useful, and this evidence raised a few questions for Connor, anyways. They weren’t important, could easily be put off until he was back at the police station, but he still wanted to get one more thing out of the way. 

Connor moved out from under the second tarp, head swivelling around as he looked for the detective and officer who had been here what seemed like just a few moments ago, but they were heading back towards the main scene, no doubt back to the parking lot. 

_ Wait, no,  _ he thought,  _ I need to show this to you, I need to ask a question, wait, hold on. _

He didn’t say any of that, though, watching them recede into the distance. His thoughts were elsewhere, otherwise occupied by visions of monstrous creatures with long, spindly limbs, gaunt and tall and always hungry, never full, always growing bigger and thinner all at once.

Fine, then. He would ask the questions of himself. 

Connor turned back to the evidence and began to run searches of multiple databases and search engines, simultaneously attempting to preconstruct the most logical answers to his various questions.

_ [SEARCH QUERIES:  _

_ COLD WEATHER BODY DECOMPOSITION, MUMMIFICATION, MISSING PERSONS REPORTS DETROIT MI 2039, ALGONQUIAN FOLKLORE, WENDIGO] _

No. Wait. That wasn’t right. He didn’t want to search Algonquian folklore or the wendigo. No, no, he needed to stop thinking about that.

_ [SEARCH QUERIES: _

_ CAMPING UTILITIES, GREAT LAKES CAMPING RESERVATIONS, DETROIT RIVER BORDER CROSSINGS, WENDIGO PSYCHOSIS, CANNIBALISM TABOOS OF SUBARCTIC INDIGENOUS PEOPLES] _

Connor blanched. He most definitely did  _ not _ want to search wendigo psychosis, whatever the hell that even was, and cannibalism taboos were just...out of the question. 

He only realized how long he’d been standing there when he heard Hank call his name.

But it was distant, muffled by snow.

Connor opened his eyes―why had they been closed? When had he closed them? He didn’t remember doing that―to find snow whipping around him in circles, an absolute blizzard. 

He looked up, and it was even worse, and no, this must be a simulation, he must have done something wrong, maybe the Zen Garden and Amanda were back, but that was impossible. 

_ Impossible, _ he repeated to himself, and he was hit with the sudden, jolting realization that he didn’t know if he had said that out loud or not. He didn’t know if he was still at the scene, how long it had been since he’d begun to analyze the evidence, where Hank had gone, if the wendigo was real or not. 

Connor began to walk, a slow and stumbling process, and he remembered the Zen Garden. With all his visual input white and blank and painful, his memory compensated with reminders of Amanda, and he suddenly regretted having a photographic memory in the most literal sense.

The answers to Connor’s search queries, long since forgotten, finally reached him as he began to move blindly towards where he knew Hank had been before the storm began to pass through, using what little environmental analysis he could pull from his memory to retrace his steps as accurately as possible. He tried, he really did, to ignore the queries, but one began to play results to him nonetheless.

_ A wendigo is not always created via possession by a monster, but can sometimes result from unchecked greed or environmental destruction. Conceptually, a wendigo can be anyone or anything, a person, group, or idea, that possesses such traits, especially a person who is out of balance internally and externally, unaligned both with their spirit and their community. Consumption, displacement, and destruction all come in the wake of any wendigo. _

Connor, struck by that sense of humor that comes only to the delirious and broken, willed up memories of the Zen Garden, of Cyberlife. Cyberlife as a person, a group, an idea. Cyberlife as the monsters, now, towering, hideous things with spidery hands and cataracted eyes. Connor ripping apart deviants, one by one, the people and then their ideas, slowly becoming the monster Cyberlife had wanted to create.

Connor tripped, and went to shut his eyes but found that they were already squeezed shut, and he slammed into icy pavement. The shock resonated throughout each and every biocomponent in his body, shaking his chassis as he, unable―or unwilling, he wasn’t sure which―to react, simply lay there in the fetal position. He would be as that corpse, no longer himself, a shell of a thing, looking monstrous. Nobody would know, just from looking, whether he had been a monster in life or not. Nobody would know how lost he had been, how far away from home he had wandered, what he’d loved. He would die RK800 #313-248-317-51, the android sent by Cyberlife, Connor Anderson, deviant hunter, deviant, some sort of conglomeration of sharp edges and things that were not supposed to go together.

Someone was calling his name now. Perhaps he would look up, if only he could will himself to do so, and find that this whole past year had been nothing but a hallucination, that he was still in the clutches of Cyberlife. Maybe Amanda was calling him, disappointed again, and what did it matter; wasn’t he meant to be obsolete anyways? (He couldn’t remember where he had heard that, but he was more certain of it than he was of when and where he lay on the cold, hard ground right in this moment.) 

“―nnor!  _ Connor! _ ”

Oh, they were still calling. They were coming closer now. 

“Son, where are you?”

_ Son? _ Amanda would never call him that. But even so, even as he began to float ghostlike back into the firm grip of reality, he couldn’t bring himself to just get up. Connor remarked on the fact that he wasn’t even shivering now, just sort of lying numbly there, everything hazy, but the world was starting to come back into sharp focus and he was suddenly and  _ nauseatingly _ aware of his hands slipping on ice, of water pooling all around him as the heat of his body slowly melted what was beneath him.

Above all, Connor was uncomfortable. Ardently, violently uncomfortable. He almost wanted to enter stasis, and he probably could if he forced it, just fall asleep right here on the ground and hibernate until spring came or until his body became a desiccated, broken thing. Whichever came first.

But this wasn’t his bed, wasn’t even the chair at his work desk. This wasn’t his home.

Footsteps cut into his thoughts, rapid and familiar, and he swore he’d heard those same footsteps around the house every day for the last year. 

_ The house? _

_ The last year? _

“Connor, son, oh fuck, shit, Connor, no, son―”

Hank might as well have been speaking in tongues, for all the incoherence of his speech. His words were slurred like he was drunk, but he’d been sober since July. Connor could hear more footsteps now, and someone was yelling. Hank was shaking him now, gently shaking him by the shoulders, that was an interesting thought, and wait, that meant he must have knelt, and that was not ideal, he would be getting his jeans wet. 

Connor didn’t know why, out of everything tonight, a minor inconvenience on Hank’s part was what finally made him snap, but it was what it was, and he forced himself to roll onto one side at that moment. 

He opened his eyes to find that it was now nighttime, but everything was light. The storm had passed, and the snow was falling soft and quiet. If Connor was being honest, it was actually quite pleasing to look at. If he didn’t count the memories of Amanda, though. And the wendigos. And the fact that he was still soaking wet and his clothes were beginning to freeze.

“Connor,” Hank said urgently. 

“Th―that’s my name, Hank,” Connor mumbled on an impulse, just for the sake of saying something, anything, to convey that he was...whatever he was. He wasn’t sure how to articulate how he was feeling right now, but he didn’t like it.

“Jesus, Connor, what happened?”

Connor blinked. Thought long and hard about what he was going to say before he said it, which for him meant he waited just long enough to make it look like what, for a human, was a suspicious amount of hesitation.

“I was held back looking for something and experienced a glitch in my search query system due to distress about the wendigo sighting you reported to me. I was caught in the snow after that, and…” 

Connor looked at the ground. This was embarrassing. But Hank was his dad. Hank had been there from the start; he knew about this. 

“I started remembering Amanda. I panicked, Hank.”

Hank sighed, and Connor’s chest seized up with panic again. Was he going to be disappointed? There was a momentary war between this instinct and Connor’s undeniable knowledge that Hank had never been truly disappointed in him, not like Amanda, and couldn’t be, not as the father that he was and had been even before Connor came around.

“I was worried about you,” Hank said, quiet, somber. He let out a dry laugh. “Shouldn't've told you about the wendigo, huh?”

“No, it’s―well, it’s not okay, but thank you for apologizing. That wasn’t exactly it. It just made me think of Amanda, and the snow did too, and it all. Sort of. You know.”

Connor made a gesture with his hands that vaguely resembled something exploding.

Hank nodded. “Well,” he said, “let’s never repeat that experience again, maybe?” He offered a hand to Connor and pulled him to his feet. Mud and snow squelched under Connor’s shoes as he stood.

“Oh, you don’t even know,” he said, yet he couldn’t help but crack a smile. As he looked around, he found that the snow no longer bothered him quite as much. He still thought of Amanda, somewhere in the back of his mind, but it annoyed him more than actually making him want to cry like it had before.

“Jesus, kid,” Hank said, “you’re soaking wet.”

Connor sighed, and let a single shiver wrack his entire body just to get the feeling back into all of his limbs. “I am aware, Hank.”

They both laughed. Now that the danger had passed, the situation was nothing but tiring and, in an ironic sort of way, humorous.

Hank shook his head at Connor, still laughing. He pulled Connor in, under one arm, bundling him up against his side, and Connor tried to protest that he would get water and snow on Hank. Hank held on nonetheless. 

“Let’s go home, Connor,” he said. 

This time, it was Connor’s turn to shake his head, in exasperation rather than in denial. “Let’s.”


End file.
